Abstract
We are currently experiencing a major efflorescence of scholarship on the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This is evident from a variety of major conferences and related activity, from the appearance of a new generation of post-1945 general histories, and from the rapid accumulation of dissertations and monographic research.1 To a great extent this can be explained by the usual rhythms of academic history, which require not only the passage of time and lengthening of perspective, but also the opening of the archives. The symbolic closure registered by the end of the century also played its part. But the onset of this degree of intensity presupposes some additional impetus. Historians were already integrating the inter-war years into both their teaching and research by the 1960s, after all, at only a quarter century’s distance from the time itself, whereas for comparable attention the post-war years have waited almost twice as long. In fact, for many years ‘1945’ functioned as a remarkably durable barrier or baseline, at which historians ceded ground to their colleagues in sociology and political science. Until quite recently, in contrast to the long assured place of contemporary US history in the curriculum, ‘Europe since 1945’ was rarely taught in US history departments, for example. Likewise, before the 1990s there were virtually no serviceable textbooks treating the period as a whole.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This chapter revisits arguments made earlier in Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–328; ‘Europe after 1945’, History Workshop Journal, 65 (Spring 2008), 195–212; and ‘When Europe was New: Liberation and the Making of the Postwar’, in Monica Riera and Gavin Schaffer (eds), The Lasting War: Society and Identity in Britain, France, and Germany after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–43. For my thinking here I am especially indebted to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Frank Biess, Atina Grossmann, Bob Moeller, Jessica Reinisch and Tara Zahra.
In addition to the Birkbeck Balzan Project and its conferences during 2005–8, major conferences also convened in Vienna in May 2005 (‘After Fascism: Re-Democratization of Western European Society and Political Culture since 1945’), Portsmouth in June 2005 (‘The End of World War Two in Comparative Perspective: Britain, France, and Germany’), and San Diego in February 2007 (‘Histories of the Aftermath: The European “Postwar in Comparative Perspective”’). See also Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This is not an exhaustive survey obviously. The upsurge of post-1945 interest has also embraced a wider variety of emphases, including the interest in collective memory which heavily dominated during the 1990s and beyond.
Among general histories of the twentieth century, two in particular have helped shape the emerging perceptions of the post-1945 era: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994);
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998).
By far the most important post-1945 general history is now Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Robert Moeller, ‘Histories of the Aftermath: The European “Postwar” in Comparative Perspective’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 41 (Fall 2007), 90. My thinking about these questions is greatly indebted to the discussions occurring at the conference in San Diego (16–17 February 2007), on which Moeller reports.
See also James E. Cronin, The World the Cold War Made: Order, Chaos, and the Return of History (New York: Routledge, 1996).
This long remained a staple of EU rhetorical advocacy. In what was in effect a valedictory address in January 1995, the French President François Mitterand reminded the European Parliament of the ‘grief, pain of separation, the presence of death’ inflicted by the nationalist rivalries reaching their brutal climax in 1939–45, to which the intervening history of ‘peace and conciliation’ could now be counterposed. See Tom Buchanan, Europe’s Troubled Peace 1945–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 1.
Both quotations are taken from Mazower, Dark Continent, 205. The first comes from a 1943 manifesto for ‘a new European order’ issued by a group of Parisian high school students; the second from an article in Le Franc-Tireur, the clandestine newspaper started in December 1941 by one of the earliest groups of French Resistance, a network of former Radicals, former Communists, and liberal Catholics based in Lyon. The wider European setting of this resistance-based Europeanism still requires sustained investigation. In the meantime, see the following: Walter Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. I: Continental Plans on European Union, 1939–1945 (New York: de Gruyter, 1985);
Michael L. Smith and Peter M. R. Stirk (eds), Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War (London: Pinter Publishers, 1990);
Bob Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000);
James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Increasingly talismanic invocations notwithstanding, the buzzwords of the ‘transnational’ and ‘histoire croisée’ (entangled histories) have stimulated an enormous amount of fruitful new discussion and research. The former term was originally proposed some time ago in the US field, but in the meantime has been taken up by others with alacrity, particularly among German historians. See Ian Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1031–55;
Akira Iriye, ‘The Internationalization of History’, American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 1–10;
Thomas Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (eds), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 2006);
C. A. Bayley, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111, 5 (December 2006), 1441–64.
The second term, ‘histoire croisée’, originates with Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45 (2006), 30–50, mooted originally in ‘Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et reflexivité’, Annales HSS, 58 (2003), 7–36.
For helpful commentary, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ‘Introduction: Comparative History, Cross-National History, Transnational History — Definitions’, in Cohen and O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004), ix–xxiv.
This is a broad-stroke summary of far more complex patterns of labour migration in the period. In the British case, for example, migrants not only arrived from South Asia and the Caribbean, but also included large numbers of Cypriots, Asians from East Africa, Chinese from Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, and smaller numbers from most other parts of the decolonising empire. Throughout the post-war era substantial immigrations also continued from the so-called white Commonwealth. Similar complexities can be elaborated for each of the other host countries of Western and Northern Europe. Scandinavia displayed a particular regional pattern, with the most dynamic economy, Sweden, drawing labour from the others (especially Finland) under the terms of the Nordic labour convention of July 1954. I have explored these questions more extensively in Geoff Eley, ‘The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe’, in Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, Heide Fehrenbach and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
For an excellent overview, see Klaus J. Bade, Legal and Illegal Immigration into Europe: Experiences and Challenges (Wassenaar: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 2003), and Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Also: Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: A History of European Minorities (London: Hambeldon Press, 1999);
Thomas Faist, ‘Migration in Contemporary Europe: European Integration, Economic Liberalization, and Protection’, in Jytte Klausen and Louise A. Tilly (eds), European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 223–48.
Here I need to acknowledge the European boundedness of my discussion. While the chapters in this volume are legitimately concerned with a specifically European upheaval, there are many ways in which the latter requires a much wider comparative frame, namely, the various global contexts of European history and European life, particularly the imperialist and colonial ones. That becomes especially pertinent, yet all too commonly neglected, precisely when migration and migrancy are brought under discussion. In the interests of brevity and focus, I have confined my thoughts here to the immediate European setting. For an indication of the wider contexts of migration, see Wayne A. Cornelius, Takeyuki Tsuda, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, second ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004),
and for differing examples of transnational study: Matthew Connelly, Unnatural Selection: The Population Control Movement and Its Struggle to Remake Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008);
James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: Beck, 2006).
For my own efforts in this direction: Geoff Eley, ‘Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name’, History Workshop Journal, 63 (Spring 2007), 154–88;
Eley, ‘The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe’, in Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Democracy and Difference in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) especially the final paragraph.
See for example Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially 131–268;
Anna Holian, ‘Displacement and the Post-War Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945–1948’, Contemporary European History, 17 (2008), 167–95.
The sharpness of the ‘displacement/replacement’ paradigm can disguise the relevance of a third term, namely, that of ‘return’. Despite their disruptive magnitude, the ultimately short-lived quality of the post-war upheavals (1918, 1945) each brought a renormalising which certainly included the return, sooner or later, of soldiers, other conscripts, and refugees. If the chapters in this volume commonly emphasise the element of non-return - as people tended not to be straightforwardly ‘re-placed’ to their sites of earlier displacement (which were themselves far less ‘original’ than might be assumed) — then a longer-term perspective might fruitfully complicate this question too. Thus to have been ‘un-homed’ during 1939–45 might lead to many different understandings of where one might find an original home, particularly in the longer context of the twentieth century as whole. The actual home that was lost at the moment of first displacement and its physical location (nationally, regionally, locally) was one of a possible number of referents, and not necessarily the most decisive. Various kinds of continuity might be imagined or reclaimed, working to sustain an imaginary of return. For some suggestive explorations, some of them autobiographical, see Angelika Bammer (ed.), Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Here I am indebted to unpublished work by Dennis Sweeney on ‘Pan-German Conceptions of Colonial Empire’ and many associated conversations. See also Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Robert L. Nelson (ed.), Colonialism in Europe? Germany’s Expansion to the East (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejuduice, 39 (2005), 197–219;
David Furber and Wendy Lower, ‘Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Ukraine’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 372–400;
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (London: Penguin, 2008).
During the past decade the relevant historiography has become ever more extensive, but the pioneering research was by Ulrich Herbert, both in his studies of Nazi labour policies and in the longer historical setting. See Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; original German edn 1985);
Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990; original German edn 1986);
Herbert (ed.), Europa und der “Reichseinsatz”: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland 1938–1945 (Essen: Klartext, 1991);
Herbert, ‘Labour and Extermination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism’, Past and Present, 138 (1993), 144–95;
Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit under dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge in Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001);
Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006), 513–51.
My thinking here is heavily indebted to the unpublished dissertation of Roberta Pergher, ‘A Tale of Two Borders: Settlement and National Transformation in Libya and South Tirol’, University of Michigan, Ph.D., 2007. The subsequent imagining and fleeting creation of a pan-Mediterranean imperial context for Italian state-making may be followed in Davide Rodogno’s magisterial Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
For my own further thoughts, see Geoff Eley, ‘Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of “Citizenship” in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 16–33;
Eley, ‘How and Where is German History Centered?’, in Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman (eds), German History from the Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 268–86;
Eley, ‘Some General Thoughts on Citizenship in Germany’, in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (eds), Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 233–46, 300–4.
This argument owes a great deal to an unpublished paper by Tara Zahra, ‘Imagined Indifference: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, a brilliant exercise in sustained scepticism. Also Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008);
Zahra, ‘The “Minority Problem” and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands’, Contemporary European History, 17 (2008), 137–65;
Jeremy King, ‘The Nationalization of East-Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond’, in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds), Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (Purdue: Purdue University Press, 2001), 112–52;
Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Of course, the renewed migrations of the post-Communist era from regions across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, whether into unified Germany or to Israel, as sundry populations supposedly reactivated or rediscovered their older affiliations, suggest how the aforementioned latitude can reappear.
The indispensable starting-point here is Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (eds), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004);
Baron and Gatrell, ‘Population Displacement, State-Building, and Social Identity in the Lands of the Former Russian Empire, 1917–1923’, Kritika. Explorations in Russian and European History, 4 (2003), 51–100;
and Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
See also Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003);
Sanborn, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I’, 77 (2005), 290–324;
Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Building in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–44.
The pioneering work spanning both world wars was Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
For a brief overview: Peter Gatrell, ‘World Wars and Population Displacement in Europe in the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), 415–26;
and for a useful general perspective: Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
See Bruce Clark, Twice Strangers: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Renee Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: The Consequences of the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003);
Penelope Papailias, Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War was Over: Reconstructing the Family Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);
Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001);
Arrigo Petacco, A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of Italians from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia-Giulia, 1943–1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
The Baltic provides similar opportunities for comparison in depth: Aija Predite, ‘Latvian Refugees and the Latvian Nation State during and after World War One’, and Tomas Balkelis, ‘In Search of a Native Realm: The Return of World War One Refugees to Lithuania, 1918–1924’, in Baron and Gatrell (eds), Homelands, 35–52, 219–22, and 74–97, 229–33; Eduard Mühle, ‘Resettled, Expelled and Displaced: The Baltic Experience 1945–1951’, in Norbert Angermann (ed.), Ostseeprovinzen, Baltische Staaten und das Nationale: Testschrift für Gert von Pistohlkors zum 70. Gerburtstag (Münster: Schriften der Baltischen Historischen Kommission, 2005), 565–89;
Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
See most recently Jan Gross, Pear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006).
See the following essays in Bessel and Schumann (eds), Life after Death; Dagmar Herzog, ‘Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of War’, 161–93; Michael Wildt, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950s’, 211–30; Paul Betts, ‘The Politics of Post-Fascist Aesthetics: 1950s East and West German Industrial Design’, 291–322; Alon Confino, ‘Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method: Why Did Some Germans Think of Tourism after May 8, 1945?’, 323–47. Also Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005);
Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 64–100;
Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
I have used the example of Germany for these citations, but see also: Stephen Gundle, ‘Visions of Prosperity: Consumerism and Popular Culture in Italy from the 1920s to the 1950s’, in Carl Levy and Mark Roseman (eds), Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918–1945–1989 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 151–72;
Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (eds), Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture, Society, 1948–1957 (Oxford: Berg, 1955);
David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle (eds), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008);
Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and for a fine general vignette of this transition, Judt, Postwar, 226–37.
For the first quotation, Ralf Dahrendrof, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 390, 384;
and for the second, Robert G. Moeller, ‘Introduction’, in Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 7, whose argument I am following closely here.
Moeller, ‘Introduction’, 8. The key transitional publication ushering in the new perspective on 1945 was a volume edited by Werner Conze and M. Rainer Lepsius, Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Beiträge zum Kontinuitätsproblem (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1983), itself the product of a series of programmatic conferences held during 1976–79.
See Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die fahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll’: Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet, and ‘Hinterher merkt man, daß es richtig war, daß es schiefgegangen ist’: Nachkriegs-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (both Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1983);
Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (eds), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1985). An excellent overview of the whole project can be found in Ulrich Herbert, ‘Zur Entwicklung der Ruhrarbeiterschaft 1930 bis 1960 aus erfahrungsgeschichtlicher Perspecktive’, in Niethammer and Plato (eds), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’, 19–52.
See Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Hans Woller (eds), Von Stalingrad zur Wahrungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988);
Hans Woller, ‘Germany in Transition from Stalingrad (1943) to Currency Reform (1948)’, in Michael Ermarth (ed.), America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945–1955 (Providence: Berg, 1993), 23–34.
For an eloquent example of work stressing the centrality of memory, see Tony Judt, ‘From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’, in Judt, Postwar, 803–31. Also Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Poltiics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Two of the best examples from the vast literature on Germany would be Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
and A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
For the historiography in general, see Robert G. Moeller, ‘Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies’, History and Memory, 17 (2005), 147–94, and ‘What Has “Coming to Terms with the Past” Meant in Post-World War II Germany? From History to Memory to the ‘History of Memory’ Central European History, 35 (2002), 223–56.
See here Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), 1008–48; and in full and compelling detail, Moeller, War Stories.
By the time Susan Traherne steps onto that hillside we know that such days will never follow. During the course of Plenty she descends from the wartime intensities of underground work for the French Resistance, which had spelled purpose, excitement, and optimism for the post-war period, into emotional illness and aimless marginality. Her personal story — drifting through jobs and relationships, failing to conceive a child, settling for an establishment marriage, sinking into medicalised quiescence — is woven into a narrative of Britain’s decline, marked by the public events of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 and the Suez Crisis in 1956. Her emotional breakdowns, presented as a willful ‘loss of control’, become metaphors for the failure to break out, where the banalities and returning conservatisms of post-war society briefly crack, only to be relentlessly restored. The material ‘plenty’ of post-war reconstruction betrays a moral lack, as Traherne moves from a logic of agency and emancipation to one of abjection. I discuss this film more extensively in larger context in Geoff Eley. ‘Finding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 818–38, esp. 829–34.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Geoff Eley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Eley, G. (2011). A Disorder of Peoples: The Uncertain Ground of Reconstruction in 1945. In: Reinisch, J., White, E. (eds) The Disentanglement of Populations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297685_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297685_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30756-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29768-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)